Ryanair boss plans £6 transatlantic flights

The Ryanair boss, Michael O'Leary, is planning to launch a transatlantic airline offering fares to the US from as little as $12 (£6.10), it emerged today.

In an interview with Flight International magazine, Mr O'Leary said he intended to fly to five or six US cities from Ryanair's 23 European bases before the end of the decade.

Flight International said the Ryanair chief intended to place an order for up to 50 wide-bodied Airbus or Boeing planes as prices start to dip following the current surge in demand for new aircraft.

"By mid-2009, we will be carrying 70 million passengers at 23 bases across Europe," Mr O'Leary said in the interview. "It will be relatively straightforward for us to do a deal for 40 to 50 long-haul aircraft and connect these bases transatlantically."

He told the magazine the new airline would be run entirely separately from Ryanair, with its own executives, board and a different name.

It would have a premium class and boost revenue from the sale of food, duty free and in-flight entertainment.

Mr O'Leary expects the services, to secondary airports such as Baltimore, Providence - in Rhode Island - and Macarthur, on New York's Long Island, "to be full".

Later, he told reporters on a flight from Dublin to Germany that he had been approached by a number of US airports keen on starting a long-haul, low-fare service.

Mr O'Leary, who repeated his plans to step down as head of the company in the next two to three years, said Ryanair would not invest the Irish-based company's own money in the new airline, which would be a sister or associate company rather than part of Ryanair, Reuters reported.

"It's a possibility," Peter Sherrard, a spokesman for the Dublin-based airline, told Bloomberg. "There would be a three or four-year timeframe, and it would be completely separate to Ryanair."

Meanwhile, the low-cost airline Zoom will offer daily flights from London to New York from June 21, with prices starting at £129 one-way, it announced today.

The budget carrier, which has been operating from UK regional airports to a number of Canadian destinations for three years, has been given permission to operate from Gatwick as an official UK carrier to the US alongside British Airways and Virgin Atlantic.

"You cannot put a sheaf of paper between the prices charged by BA, Virgin and the American carriers on the New York route, and it is high time that passengers had a better deal," the Zoom founder, John Boyle, said. "We are offering savings of up to 70% on these flights."

The Zoom flights to New York would start ahead of any new services arising from the new EU-US open skies agreement, due to be launched in March 2008.

From that date, many more airlines in the EU will be able to operate flights to the US, while mergers are likely to become more commonplace.

A spokeswoman said Zoom had an environmental policy in place to limit any damage to the environment caused by more transatlantic flights.

She added that because the airline's aircraft were not fitted with first or business class seating, carbon dioxide emissions per passenger were up to 20% lower than those of major airlines on comparable flights.

Friends of the Earth renewed its calls for the government to ensure that airlines pay for their emissions.

"Aviation is the fastest-growing source of carbon dioxide emissions in the UK and artificially cheap long-haul flights are certain to accelerate this growth," the organisation's aviation campaigner, Richard Dyer, said.

"If the government is serious about tackling climate change, it must make airlines pay for their environmental impact."